Feast Your Eyes on This Old-School Weather Model

Weather forecasting has come a long way, as the video below of a midcentury climate model illustrates. And if you’re into vintage computer graphics, it provides some pretty nice eye candy too.

The footage, recently published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, shows the first global general circulation model constructed by physicist Chuck Leith on the lab’s supercomputers in the late 50s.

The lab has more details:

It simulated the growth, movement, and decay of large weather systems from the fundamental laws of physics. This model was the first in a series in which the Laboratory’s computational capabilities were used to study atmospheric processes.